by Andrew Morrison
forthcoming in A. Marmodoro, J. Hill (eds.), The Author's Voice in Classical Antiquity (Oxford)
To many of the most famous historical figures of antiquity, in particular various philosophers, orators and statesmen,... more
To many of the most famous historical figures of antiquity, in particular various philosophers, orators and statesmen, are attributed collections of letters purporting to be authored by these famous names, which include Socrates, Plato, Salon and Themistocles. These letters are at last receiving the scholarly attention they merit (in general works such as Patricia Rosenmeyer’s Ancient Epistolary Fictions (2001) and specific studies such as Johanna Hanink’s recent piece on the letters of Euripides in GRBS (2010)), having been neglected since the work of Richard Bentley on the letters of Phalaris at the end of the seventeenth century. Bentley argued decisively that the letters were not ‘authentic’ but rather inventions by later writers attempting to pass them off as the genuine work of the eminent figures in whose guise they are written. But these collections, I argue, provide valuable insights into ancient conceptions of authorship and the ways in which ancient readers ‘read for the author’: in the relationship they construct between the collection’s principal epistolary voice (in narratological terms, its ‘primary narrator’) and the purported real author to whom the collection attributes itself they mimic the situation of texts in which narrators closely resemble their historical authors (e.g. through sharing a name, nationality, etc.). But in the case of fictional letter-collections the real author is in fact a different, anonymous author: to what extent this difference was felt to be important by ancient readers, and how it was negotiated by the fictional letter-collections themselves, are important questions this paper will address.
I examine the ways in which four different pseudonymous letter-collections (those attributed to Plato, Xenophon , Solon, and Euripides) portray themselves as the work of their purported famous authors, how the authority of individual letter and wider collection depends on the creation of an impression of authorship by a particular historical individual, and the functions to which the authority so created are put. The collections regularly show a keen interest in (and play with) the notions of authenticity and survival (as in the Platonic Epistle 2, which contains a paradoxical instruction to the addressee to burn the letter (314c), lest its contents endanger the secrecy of the author’s doctrines), which has important consequences for our view of the degree to which such letters were supposed to deceive readers into believing they were the authentic productions of their pseudonymous authors. Some of these collections set themselves up (as Hanink has recently argued with reference to the letters of Euripides) as alternatives to the mainstream biographical tradition (in the ‘Lives’ of famous philosophers, politicians or poets) about their purported author: I shall examine the interaction between these letter-collections and the biographical tradition about their pseudonymous authors, and scrutinise the ways in which the letters adapt, distort or contradict not only aspects of their authentic literary productions (e.g. the Platonic dialogues in the case of the Platonic letters) but also biographical ‘facts’ about their authors based certain readings of these genuine literary works. The picture which emerges is one which points to a sophisticated conception of authorship and provides important (and long neglected) evidence for the relationship of the narrating voice of a text and its supposed author in antiquity.
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